Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® by Michael Brunsfeld Read Free Book Online Page B

Mo Ti, who lived in the fifth century B.C. In the 10th century A.D., Arab physicist Alhazen discovered that the smaller he made the hole, the sharper the image came into focus. If the hole was tiny enough, the image became very clear.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
    Reproducing the image created by a camera obscura was easy: you simply held a piece of paper up against the wall, so that the image landed on the paper, then traced it. The camera obscura became a useful scientific tool. Scientists built special “dark rooms” for the sole purpose of studying the sky, eclipses, changes in the seasons, and other natural events. The tracings made with the aid of the camera obscuras were so detailed and accurate that by the 1500s, people were using them to paint portraits, landscapes, and other scenes.
    In 1568 a professor at the University of Padua named Daniello Barbaro discovered that replacing the primitive pinhole with a glass lens brought the camera obscura image into a brighter and sharper focus.
    Ice covers about 15% of the Earth’s land mass.
    In the 17th century, scientists and artists developed portable camera obscuras that allowed them to study objects in the field. Early versions were essentially lightproof tents with lenses sewn into the walls. Later versions were two-foot-long wooden boxes that projected an image onto a piece of frosted glass built into the lid. The user could then trace the image by placing a piece of paper over the glass.
PUTTING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE
    The images created by these early single-lens camera obscuras were circular in shape, with distortion along the edges. In the 1700s, a complex multilens system was introduced that corrected the distortion, and the camera obscura became as common a part of the painter’s art as brushes and paint.
    Artists weren’t the only ones putting the camera to use—explorers took them on expeditions all over the world so that they could record the wonders they encountered. In the process, the boxes literally changed the way people saw the world.
IMAGE PROBLEMS
    For all of these improvements, there was still no way to
capture
the camera obscura’s image other than by manually tracing it. There it was, tantalizingly projected onto a wall or a pane of frosted glass. You could look at it, you could reach out and touch it. But capturing the actual image was as impossible as capturing one’s own shadow. It would remain so for another 75 years…until the invention of film.
    So which came first, the camera or the film? The camera—by centuries.
    For part II of the “History of Photography,” turn to page 107 .

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
    The state of Arizona does not follow Daylight Saving Time, with the exception of the Navajo Reservation, which does—except for the Hopi Partitioned Land which lies inside the Navajo Reservation, which doesn’t.
    Tuesday Weld was born on a Friday.

HOY, HOY
    Professor Howard Richler, etymologist and BRI member, sent us this explanation of why we say what we say every time the phone rings… Hello?
BACKGROUND
    The common English word of greeting dates back to the 14th century. Some sources say
hello
descends from the Old German
hala,
a form of “to fetch.” Others believe the word to be a derivative of the Middle French
hola,
meaning “hey there.” Still another theory claims
hello
is a derivative of the cry
au loup
used by Norman English hunters when they spotted a wolf.
    Today,
“Hello”
is the most common telephone greeting in the United States. But Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, actually preferred the term
“Ahoy.”
In fact, the first telephone operators in New Haven, Connecticut, greeted callers with “Ahoy! Ahoy!” The problem was that although
“Ahoy”
was seaworthy, it didn’t resonate with landlubbers in Peoria.
WHO IS SPEAKING!
    Expressions such as “Are you there?”—one of the first telephone salutations—were too long, and “Good day” and “Good morning” could be